Sep. 5, 2006 - nothing stays the same / Stuyvesant Town before and (soon to be) after
two perspectives on Stuyvesant Town
The Times ran two nice Op-Ed pieces on Sunday in “The City” section that come from two directions at the recent news that Met Life is putting the 100+ buildings of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village up for sale.
One is a mostly personal story, tinged with nostalgia and an (admittedly) snobbish attitude. The other puts the news n a broader social and political context. Especially in tandem, they are perfect fodder for the view that nothing stays the same in Manhattan. Deal with it!
one prof has a personal perspective of loss of “an original vibrant community”
Corinne Demas is a professor at Mount Holyoke who published a memoir about growing up in Stuy Town from 1948-68. “I was a Stuyvesant Town snob: splendidly middle class, admirably unpretentious.”
She talks about the application process and the long waiting lists, she rues the creation of the “two class community” that resulted from some apartments being modernized and rented at market rates, and the mourns the loss of community that will result as market forces tear at these complexes:
The coming sale of StuyvesantTown and Peter Cooper spells the dismantlement of what’s left of the original vibrant community — one based on shared values and priorities. Luxury apartments can provide renters with a host of amenities (both real and imagined) but community is one amenity money can’t buy.
The transformation of these two complexes with their 110 apartment buildings is unfortunate for the thousands of residents who will eventually lose their apartments, and for the thousands of young families who will lose their dream of ever living there. But the implications are also sad for the City of New York. StuyvesantTown was the middle-class heart of the city, a utopia from the 1950’s that exists nowhere else.
did the Times set her up?
Nice piece, well written. But I wonder if Ms. Demas feels sandbagged, being paired with the piece by Samuel Zipp, a professor at UC Irvine who has written about the history of urban renewal in Manhattan.
Mr. Zipp starts his story at an earlier time than Ms. Demas’ personal memoir, when there were 18 blocks of tenements, storefronts and warehouses in this “Gas House District” (so-named after the many gas storage and distribution facilities nearby). This neighborhood was “little different from the area to its south that we today call the EastVillage” (note that there is a huge Con Ed plant that survives, just north of Alphabet City).
one prof sees market forces causing change, not for the better – again – but no nostalgia
Stuy Town was to charge about twice the rents then prevailing, rents that only 3% of the neighborhood’s families would be able to afford.
Residents of the area [a “polyglot collection of European immigrants and their children”] rose to defend their homes, but their protests largely fell on deaf ears. The promise of StuyvesantTown was just too alluring. The neighborhood had problems — run-down and abandoned buildings, the stench and danger of the gas works — but clearance also dispersed the relations of kinship, friendship and commerce that come to characterize a neighborhood.
And, of course, Met Life planned for StuyTown to be all-white. While the complex was officially desegregated in 1952 after long protests, it took twenty years for there to be a significant black population.
In Zipp’s telling, the success of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village inspired the urban renewal projects of the 1950s and 1960s that,
[w]ith a few exceptions, … served to reinforce already existing patterns of racial segregation. They reclaimed desirable real estate for white-collar institutions and provided bastions of middle-class urban living for primarily white populations.
Demas has fond memories of life in the enclave. Zipp sees its broader costs:
As the urban renewal projects inspired by StuyvesantTown obliterated acre after acre of working-class, black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods, New Yorkers came to feel these losses more deeply. By the mid-1960’s, few were willing to countenance the kind of destruction StuyvesantTown had required.
Zipp can also see that changing the character of this complex will be another loss, but one with a legacy that deserves to be remembered:
Stuyvesant Town has always been a pleasant refuge from the city. Many of its residents fought, over the years, to make it a more inclusive place. We are right to rue the loss of this city institution — there’s no doubt that we are all the poorer for it. But however congenial life in Stuyvesant Town has been for those lucky enough to live there, the project’s less savory legacy should not be forgotten.
In his telling, Zipp sees Stuy Town as the victim of the same kind of Manhattan market forces that generated its creation in the first place:
Having begun its life as the state-of-the-art method for supplanting working-class neighborhoods with middle-class apartment towers and white-collar institutions, Stuyvesant Town will end up as a victim of a newer, less abrupt and violent version of the very forces of urban change it helped unleash more than 50 years ago.
in Manhattan, not all “change” is “progress”, just inevitable
The prewar Gas House District begat a middle class enclave for white families in the postwar period. In the immediate area, that new pattern of housing spurred retail and other services along First Avenue, and probably has something to do with the (eventual) gentrification of that part of the East Village known as Alphabet City, whose grittier days are memorialized in “Rent” and a wave of other ‘80s and ‘90s nostalgia.
Now, as enough apartments in the complex leave the rent regulation system, Met Life sees an opportunity to try to sell for $5 billion.
That prospect causes some people to celebrate “back in the day” and to (without irony) rue the very processes of change that created their idyll in the first place. Others rue, but calculate costs and benefits differently
Plus ca change….
© Sandy Mattingly 2006
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